Catherine Murray | Schools Week

How partnership working will work…and why it could fail

In the nine years Nick Gibb has been minister for schools (under one guise or another), we’ve seen a plethora of government reports on the state-funded education settings known as alternative provision. We’ve had the Charlie Taylor review of alternative provision, the School exclusion trial evaluation, the Alternative provision market analysis and the Investigative research […]

The academy trust that’s run like an edtech start-up

XP and XP East sit like tiny pods on a giant lot in a Doncaster retail park. I’ve just been given a tour by a couple of year 8 students who’ve explained how they learn everything through half-termly “expeditions” (projects), don’t wear uniform “because they don’t want us to look all the same”, and find […]

Zoe Carr, CEO, WISE Academies

Ofsted has just descended on the most challenging school in the WISE Academies trust, and CEO Zoe Carr is sat here, offering me branded cupcakes at one of the trust’s other primaries, Town End Academy in Sunderland. Welbeck Academy, where the inspection is taking place, has 77 per cent pupil premium students and an attendance […]

Christine Counsell, Director of Education, Inspiration Trust

Norfolk-based Inspiration Trust is proud of its reputation as a “knowledge-based” multi-academy trust – evidenced by one of the mission statements fronting their slick website: “Securing literacy and learning through a knowledge rich curriculum”. But if you think that will make it easy to squash their director of education into an ideological box, think again. […]